Over the last several years I have come to have a special appreciation for
John Judis, a veteran journalist who has been identified with liberal
Democratic causes and who now writes for The New Republic. Why? Because
he is a student of political philosophy and of political history, which
compels him to keep an open mind on interesting ideas of political economy
that are rejected out of hand by almost all other journalists in the
“liberal” camp. (And conservative camp too.) Here is a long-headed piece
he sent to me today which he wrote for the current issue of TNR, which
you could not read otherwise unless you bought the hard-copy of the magazine.
I thank John and his boss, Marty Peretz, for this gift. It is not an essay you
want to begin right now unless you have a block of time staring you in the
face and a taste for political philosophy. You should print it out and read it
when you are in the mood. This is really a superb article, a four-star effort
in my estimation:

A History Lesson by John B. JudisThe New Republic June 9

History is not physics. Studying the past does not yield objective
laws that can unerringly predict the course of events. But peoples do draw
lessons from history and change their behavior accordingly. Western European
countries, for instance, took the experience of two world wars as reason to
change radically their relations with one another. The United States took the
experience of the Great Depression as reason to alter the relationship between
government and the market.

Historical lessons can also be unlearned or forgotten. The New Left of the
1960s, for instance, forgot the lessons of an earlier "God that
failed" and projected the same hopes for a communist utopia onto Castro's
Cuba or Ho Chi Minh's Vietnam that earlier generations had projected onto the
Soviet Union. And, today, the right is going through its own bout of
historical amnesia. Conservatives, forgetting the lessons of the early
twentieth century, are attempting to rehabilitate the long-discredited
strategy of imperialism.

The revival is centered in East Coast journals and think tanks, from National
Review and The Wall Street Journal editorial page in New York to
the American Enterprise Institute, The Weekly Standard, Policy
Review, and the Project for the New American Century in Washington. In an
October 2001 Weekly Standard cover story, Max Boot called on the United
States "unambiguously to embrace its imperial role." In Foreign
Affairs last July, Thomas Donnelly, a former Lockheed official who is a senior
fellow at the Project for the New American Century, wrote that "American
imperialism can bring with it new hopes of liberty, security, and
prosperity." In Policy Review last April, Stanley Kurtz called for
a new "democratic imperialism."

Although the Bush administration's foreign policy is a mix of different
ideologies, it has clearly been influenced by this new imperialism. Evidence
can be found in the cultlike popularity of Theodore Roosevelt, the president
many conservatives take as their guide to a neo-imperial strategy. (George W.
Bush has declared Roosevelt his favorite president, and Donald Rumsfeld
displays a plaque quoting TR on his Pentagon desk.) More important, it is
evident in the administration's attitude toward international institutions,
its arguments for invading and occupying Iraq, its case for preventive war,
and even its international economic strategy.

This new imperialism differs in some respects from the older U.S. imperialism
of Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge—the new imperialists don't
assume, for instance, the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race or seek the
spread of Christian civilization—but it is sufficiently similar to raise the
question of whether these new imperialists are reviving a strategy that failed
the United States 80 years ago. That failure was understood most clearly by
Woodrow Wilson, who offered not only the most compelling critique of U.S.
imperialism but also the most thoughtful alternative—a liberal
internationalism that served the United States well in the second half of the
twentieth century and could guide Americans again today.

There have been empires since the Greeks and Romans, but modern imperialism,
and the term "imperialism" itself, appeared in the late nineteenth
century. From 1870 to 1914, when World War I began, the great European powers
and Japan carved up Asia and Africa into colonies, protectorates, and client
regimes. The United States, still recovering from the Civil War and having not
yet completed its continental expansion, initially forswore any imperial
ambitions. But, by the 1890s, a powerful lobby led by Roosevelt (who would
become assistant secretary of the Navy in the McKinley administration) and
Lodge was calling for an "expansionist" foreign policy.

Like their European counterparts, the American imperialists were worried about
ensuring national prosperity. They contended, particularly after the
depression of the mid-1890s, that, if the United States failed to gain a
foothold in Asia and Africa, it would be denied access to raw materials and
important markets for the surplus of goods that its factories could now
produce. But Roosevelt and Lodge also saw imperialism through the prism of
geopolitics, social Darwinism, and evangelical Protestantism. Roosevelt
regarded it as integral to a struggle for the "domination of the
world" that the United States must either win or lose. If the United
States failed to seize the Hawaiian Islands, Roosevelt warned in 1898, they
could be "transformed into the most dangerous possible base of operations
against our Pacific cities." Imperialism also offered a way to provide
moral uplift to Americans—by fostering a spirit of what Roosevelt called
"national greatness"—and to extend the benefits of American, and
more broadly Anglo-Saxon and Christian, civilization to the
"barbarous" peoples of Asia and Africa. Wrote Roosevelt in 1901,
"It is our duty toward the people living in barbarism to see that they
are freed from their chains."

The American imperialists first got their chance in 1898. Accusing the Spanish
of blowing up the battleship Maine in the Havana harbor (the explosion later
turned out to be from a defective boiler), the United States declared war on
Spain and seized its possessions in the Caribbean and the Pacific, including
Cuba and the Philippines. The United States, it seemed, had enthusiastically
entered the imperial fray.

Yet, in less than a decade, the United States would abandon its imperial
mission and, five years after that, explicitly repudiate it. The abandonment
of imperialism began, ironically, with Roosevelt. While publicly continuing to
support an imperialist foreign policy, Roosevelt actually allowed U.S.
possessions to shrink during his two terms as president (1901-1908) and
resisted pleas to establish new U.S. bases in China and the Caribbean. In
1902, he wrote to prominent New York lawyer Frederick Coudert, "Barring
the possible necessity of fortifying the Isthmian canal or getting a naval
station, I hope it will not become our duty to take a foot of soil south of
us."

Like Roosevelt, Wilson was an early advocate of imperialism—for example,
arguing in 1902 that the "impulse to expansion is the natural and
wholesome impulse, which comes from a consciousness of matured
strength"—but refrained from endorsing it once he ascended to the
presidency. In 1913, his first year in office, Wilson withdrew America's
support for a bank consortium in China that the United States, along with
Britain and other occupying powers, had established to parcel out China's
economy. "I will not help any man buy a power which he ought not to
exercise over fellow beings," he commented. He also pressured Congress to
grant early independence to the Philippines and citizenship to Puerto Ricans.

Most important, Wilson made self-determination and an end to colonialism the
hallmarks of his plan for ending World War I and preventing future wars.
During the Senate debate in 1920 over the League of Nations, Wilson argued
that Americans had "a choice between ... the ideal of democracy, which
represents the rights of free peoples everywhere to govern themselves, and ...
the ideal of imperialism, which seeks to dominate by force and unjust
power." Imperialism, to Wilson, was not an instrument of democracy but an
obstacle to it.

What initially turned Roosevelt privately and Wilson publicly against
imperialism were the nationalist backlashes that America's imperialist
policies provoked. Roosevelt and other American imperialists had believed they
could impose U.S. civilization upon conquered peoples as readily as they had
transformed the continental frontier. But, in the first decades of the
twentieth century, they were to discover that imperial intervention inspired
anti-imperial nationalist movements that frustrated U.S. objectives. Roosevelt
had promised to "civilize" the Filipinos, but, soon after the United
States took power in 1898, it faced a succession of violent national
rebellions. By 1902, at least 4,000 Americans and 200,000 Filipinos had been
killed. When World War I began, Roosevelt finally urged U.S. withdrawal from
the Philippines.

Wilson experienced similar frustration in Mexico. The Mexican Revolution had
begun in 1910, and the next year liberal constitutionalist Francisco Madero
overthrew dictator Porfirio Diaz. In 1913, Madero was murdered and replaced by
General Victoriano Huerta. With Mexico on the verge of civil war, Wilson
landed troops in Veracruz to depose the unpopular Huerta. "I am going to
teach the South American republics to elect good men," Wilson declared.
But Huerta used Wilson's intervention to rally support against Yankee
imperialism. And Huerta's successor, the revolutionary Venustiano Carranza,
fearful of being identified with the Yankee invaders, rebuffed Wilson's
diplomatic overtures. Wilson, biographer Kendrick A. Clements writes, was
"stunned by the fury with which the invasion was greeted by Mexicans of
all political persuasions." Although Roosevelt and others urged him to
impose a pliant regime on Mexico by force, Wilson instead withdrew the troops
and recognized Carranza. "There are in my judgment no conceivable
circumstances which would make it right for us to direct by force or threat of
force the internal processes of what is a revolution as profound as that which
occurred in France," Wilson wrote to his secretary of war in August 1914.

Wilson's opposition to imperialism was hardened by World War I.

Proponents of empire had previously argued that imperial expansion would
reduce the chances of global war by eliminating unstable regimes in Africa and
Asia. "Peace cannot be had until the civilized nations have expanded in
some shape over the barbarous nations," wrote Roosevelt in 1894. But, by
making the struggle for imperial domination integral to a nation's power and
prosperity, imperialism instead led to a succession of conflicts culminating
in world war: the Russo-Japanese war in 1904-1905 over Manchuria and Korea;
the clashes between Germany and France over French North Africa in 1906 and in
1911; the Anglo-German naval arms race for control of the seas and the world's
commerce; the growing tensions in the Middle East, where oil had been
discovered; and, finally, the outbreak of war in 1914 between Austria and
Russia over Turkey's former possessions in the Balkans, a conflict that
quickly pulled in all of Europe's great powers. When the United States entered
the war in 1917, Wilson would publicly blame it on German militarism. But,
when it came to making proposals to prevent future wars, Wilson showed that he
believed imperial rivalry lay at the root of the conflagration. "For my
own part," he told the Senate in 1920, "I am as intolerant of
imperialistic designs on the part of other nations as I was of such designs on
the part of Germany."

Wilson saw imperialism not simply as a strategy or policy but as a system of
international relations that had to be thoroughly uprooted. It was
characterized by a hierarchy of power in which the larger, more powerful
nations competed violently with each other to dominate the smaller, less
powerful ones. To the extent it didn't immediately lead to war, it was because
of a coincidental and transient balance of power among the larger powers. The
system itself, he believed, was inherently unstable as well as unjust.

Wilson didn't believe he could eliminate hierarchies of power, but he
contrived to create a mediating system of international law and organizations
that would protect the sovereignty and independence of smaller, weaker
nations. Within this realm, all nations would become equal, just as all
citizens were legally equal, regardless of their strength or wealth, within a
democracy. In his Fourteen Points, which he announced to Congress in January
1918, and in the draft charter of a new League of Nations that he wrote and
introduced the next year, Wilson called for phasing out colonialism,
eliminating protectionist trade barriers, and establishing a worldwide system
of free trade. "There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of
power," he explained, "not organized rivalries, but an organized
common peace."

Like Roosevelt, Wilson believed that Americans were chosen to transform the
backward nations of the world. He thought of the United States "as the
light of the world as created to lead the world in the assertion of the rights
of peoples and the rights of free nations." Citing this commitment to
global democracy, some of today's neoconservatives, including my colleague
Lawrence F. Kaplan, have argued that they are the true heirs of Wilsonianism.
But, unlike the turn-of-the-century imperialists or today's neoconservatives,
Wilson did not believe the world's great powers, acting individually, should
impose their political beliefs or economic systems on former colonies or
protectorates. Instead, Wilson believed the great nations had to act together
within an organization such as the League of Nations. He proposed a
"mandate system" by which the transition to self-government in
Africa or Asia would be overseen by smaller, non-imperial nations, such as
Sweden. Wilson believed in spreading democracy and Christian civilization, but
he believed the United States had to do it through international organizations
and outside the framework of imperial power.

At Versailles, America's allies rejected Wilson's proposals for free trade and
an end to imperialism. They insisted that German aggression was the sole cause
of World War I and sought to curb it through reparations and a divvying up of
German colonies. Back home, Lodge and conservative Republicans rejected even
the weakened League of Nations because they feared it put America's foreign
policy at the mercy of an international organization.

Wilson's internationalism was shelved for two decades, but the outbreak of
World War II, precipitated by Germany, Italy, and Japan's efforts to conquer
Europe, Africa, and Asia, confirmed Wilson's warnings that the system of
imperialism, if not uprooted, would again lead to war. And so the Franklin
Roosevelt and Truman administrations adopted the outlines of Wilson's
approach. They made ending imperialism and dismantling trade and currency
blocs one of their principal war aims; and, rejecting Wilson's reliance on a
single organization, they built many international organizations — including
the United Nations, NATO, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World
Bank—that attempted to create a "community of power" without
ignoring existing disparities of power.

The events of the last 50 years have confirmed the correctness of this neo-Wilsonian
strategy. The second half of the twentieth century, when compared with the
first, was prosperous and pacific. The international institutions the United
States built helped to win the cold war against the Soviet Union, which under
Stalin became heir to czarist Russia's imperial ambitions. The British,
French, Germans, Italians, and Dutch abandoned their empires and subordinated
their national ambitions to a new, supranational organization, the European
Union. Under the IMF, gatt, and now the World Trade Organization, the world
has tempered the older cycle of boom and extreme bust.

In addition, the World Bank—along with the United Nations, the European
Union, and NATO—has, to a considerable extent, taken over the civilizing and
stabilizing functions that the imperial nations once claimed for themselves.
Some of these efforts have been less than successful, but, in Africa and Asia,
these organizations have helped guide former colonies toward self-government.
As a last resort, the United Nations and NATO have sanctioned the use of force
to protect or expand the community of power—in 1991, the United Nations
backed the coalition that drove Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, defending the
sovereignty of a smaller, weaker nation, and, in 1995 and 1999, NATO took
action against Slobodan Milosevic in the former Yugoslavia.

Republican conservatives embraced this Wilsonian approach grudgingly during
the cold war, backing NATO, if not the United Nations, as a means to defeat
communism. But, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, conservatives
divided into two camps. Some, led by former Reagan official Pat Buchanan and
House Republicans, reverted to the isolationism and protectionism of 1920s
Republicans. Others, led by neoconservatives such as Paul Wolfowitz, William
Kristol, Richard Perle, and Robert Kagan, continued to advocate the
transformation of the world in America's image, but they repudiated Wilson's
internationalist methods in favor of Roosevelt's imperial strategy. As Kristol
explained in Commentary in January 2000, "[T]here is a fundamental
difference between us and the true Wilsonians—between, that is, the muscular
patriotism of Teddy Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan and the utopian
multilateralism of Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton."

Like Roosevelt and the late-nineteenth-century expansionists, the new
imperialists want to transform the politics and allegiances of countries and
regions, and they are willing to use force unilaterally to do so. Like the old
imperialists, the new ones see overseas intervention in evangelical, although
secular, terms. They believe in what the Hoover Institution's Dinesh d'Souza
has called "America's evident moral superiority" and see the United
States as having a special responsibility to transform the world in its image.
"[I]mperialism as the midwife of democratic self-rule is an undeniable
good," Kurtz writes. And, like Roosevelt, they see the politics of this
new imperialism as an expression of patriotism and of support for
"national greatness."

The new imperialists are even less equivocal than the old in rejecting
multilateral institutions. Now that the United States has become the premier
world power, they argue, it has no need for international organizations except
on an ad hoc basis. Unlike Wilson, or contemporary Wilsonians such as Bill
Clinton, they actually prefer for the United States to act alone or in ad hoc
coalitions that the United States dominates. And they despise the United
Nations, which Perle has described as the "chatterbox on the Hudson"
and columnist Charles Krauthammer has opined should "sink ... into
irrelevance."

Wilson wanted a world in which the community of power would eventually
overshadow the balance of power. The new imperialists regard that as a
dangerous illusion. They think the United States will always have to depend on
superior military power for its security; employing it, if necessary, to
eliminate or intimidate potential competitors and adversaries. Wilson wanted a
mediating realm of equal, independent nations governed by Kantian moral
universality, in which what is justifiable for one country must be justifiable
for all. The new imperialists invoke America's global mission to limit the
prerogatives of other nations but not the United States. They support
sustained violations of other nations' sovereignty, for instance, in the name
of nonproliferation and human rights, but reject virtually any infringements
on U.S. sovereignty at all. As Stephen Peter Rosen wrote in The National
Interest, "The organizing principle of empire rests ... on the
existence of an overarching power that creates and enforces the principle of
hierarchy, but is not itself bound by such rules."

During Bush's presidency, the primary goal of the new imperialists has been
winning support for an invasion of Iraq that would overthrow Saddam's regime
and transform the entire region. By democratizing Iraq and pulling its oil
industry out of the Saudi-dominated opec, they believed they could bring the
region into America's orbit in much the way the older imperialists had
imagined turning the western Pacific into an American sphere of influence.

Colin Powell and the State Department, by contrast, advocated conditioning the
invasion on U.N. support. But, even after Bush acceded to Powell's arguments
and went to the United Nations in September 2002, it was clear that the United
States was committed to an invasion with or without U.N. support. After
Baghdad fell, Powell once again advocated a Wilsonian approach, but once again
he appears to have lost the debate to the neo-imperialists in the Pentagon.
The United States has taken control of Iraq's oil industry (hinting already it
will not honor opec quotas) and shunned international supervision of Iraq's
transition to self-rule.

If the Bush administration continues its present course, Iraq will be a good
test of whether America's new imperial strategy can escape the pitfalls that
doomed the last one. Indeed, there are already warning signs that the United
States could encounter the same anti-imperial nationalism in Iraq that
bedeviled it in the Philippines in the early 1900s and in Mexico in 1914.
Since Saddam's statue fell on April 9, there have been continual
demonstrations calling for the United States to leave Iraq. (By contrast,
there have been very few organized expressions of support for the U.S.
occupation.) On May 20, in Baghdad, 10,000 marched from a Sunni mosque to a
Shia shrine bearing signs that read, no, no, no u.s.a. The two major Shia
clerics currently vying for leadership—Ayatollah Muhammad Bakr Al Hakim and
Moktada Al Sadr—have both called for the United States to leave Iraq. Even
the generally pro-American Kurdish leaders have turned truculent since the
U.S. decision to postpone the creation of an interim Iraqi government.

The U.S. show of force in Iraq may have cowed neighboring regimes, but it does
not seem to have intimidated Islamic radicals, who have resumed and even
stepped up terrorist attacks in the region. Writing in the British Guardian,
Saad Al Fagih, a leading Saudi dissident, warned that the U.S. invasion and
occupation in Iraq could strengthen Islamic radicalism: "The invasion and
occupation of Iraq will never be seen as a liberation. The sight of U.S. tanks
in Baghdad has been regarded as the most humiliating event for Arabs and
Muslims since 1967. ... [Osama] Bin Laden and his supporters can now be
expected to see his war as more justified than ever because of the occupation
of Iraq." Many European intelligence agencies seem to agree.

Americans generally interpret this growing Islamic radicalism as a new
phenomenon. And to some extent it is. But it is also a particularly ugly
manifestation of a Third World nationalism that has frustrated imperialist
efforts since China's Boxer Rebellion of 1900. In neighboring Iran, for
instance, the Islamic radicals of the late '70s saw themselves as the
successors to nationalist Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadeq, whom the United
States had helped overthrow in 1953. Olivier Roy, an authority on and critic
of radical Islam, wrote in The New York Times this month, "The United
States cannot stand alone when dealing with the driving force in the Middle
East. This is neither Islamism nor the appetite for democracy, but simply
nationalism—whether it comes in the guise of democracy, secular
totalitarianism or Islamic fervor.”

Nor has the Bush administration's imperialist approach been limited to Iraq.
It has been evident in its dismissive attitude toward European allies that
have worked closely with the United States in the Balkans and Afghanistan and
in its rejection of international treaties. The administration has even
adopted the rudiments of a protectionist economic strategy. While mouthing
support for free trade, it has slapped tariffs on imported steel and, instead
of allowing the dollar's value to reflect impersonal currency markets, has
driven down its price by actively encouraging speculation against it. Reducing
the dollar's value against other countries' currencies makes U.S. exports
cheaper and their imports more expensive. It is equivalent to putting a tariff
on imports and is likely to elicit reprisals from abroad.

The Bush administration's rejection of international institutions, its
readiness to wage aggressive, preventive wars to dominate a vital region, and
its protectionist trade strategy have already aroused considerable popular
opposition—not just in surrounding Arab nations, but in Europe and Asia as
well. In recent elections in countries as diverse as Belgium, Germany, Spain,
South Korea, and Pakistan, the parties most identified with opposition to U.S.
foreign policy emerged victorious. This popular opposition is already sparking
a challenge to U.S. hegemony. Initially, such a challenge is taking the form
of terrorism by Islamic radicals—asymmetric military challenges, in the
current jargon—and of what political scientists call "soft
balancing." These latter tactics focus on economic policy and on
diplomacy in the United Nations, NATO, and other international organizations.
In response to U.S. steel tariffs, the European Union has convinced the World
Trade Organization to rule against their legality and has refused to remove
its ban on genetically modified food imports. EU hostility to the United
States also contributed to the failure of last February's World Trade
Organization negotiations in Tokyo. Also, according to Cox News, "Many
Muslim clerics [have begun] demanding that Arab countries sell oil for euros,
not dollars"—and the Russian and Iranian parliaments are considering
doing exactly that. If a significant percentage of oil sales were in euros
rather than dollars, the price of oil imports would rise in the United States.
More important, the United States would lose the freedom it now has to run
large budget deficits financed by oil exporters using their surplus dollars to
buy Treasury notes.

There is also growing discussion in Europe of expanding the European Union to
meet the challenge of U.S. hegemony. In a recent report on Europe's economic
future, France's leading think tank, the Institut Français des Rélations
Internationales, warned that, if Europe doesn't want to be dominated by the
United States, it must create an economic bloc that would stretch to Russia in
the east and to Arab North Africa in the south. Such a bloc would enjoy
natural resources and a pool of well-educated professionals and low-wage
service workers.

Eventually, attempts to balance America's imperial efforts may even take
"hard," military forms. The U.S. war in Iraq pushed the EU countries
closer to developing an independent military, with Germany, France, Belgium,
and Luxembourg meeting in April to plan a new, multinational force. The war
also brought France, Germany, and Russia closer together. A military, as well
as economic, alliance between Western Europe and nuclear-armed Russia could
one day pose a real threat to U.S. dominance. Together with the inevitable
growth of China as an economic and military power, it could lead to a world
divided into hostile U.S., Euro-Russian, and Chinese power blocs. That's
highly speculative, of course, but this disaggregation of a "unipolar"
world dominated by a single imperial power into hostile alliances has happened
once before—during the last era of British-dominated great-power
imperialism.

The new American imperialists, who view the world as a hierarchy governed by
military power, would argue that the development of such blocs is
inevitable—unless the United States actively discourages its allies as well
as rogue states from competing against it. But Wilsonians see the world and
the future differently. They would argue that, by encouraging supranational
institutions and agreements, and by exercising its authority benignly, the
United States stands a far better chance of preventing the older imperial
rivalries from reemerging. Realists, such as University of Chicago political
scientist Robert Pape, concur. Writes Pape, "Aside from the Soviet Union,
major powers have never made serious efforts to balance against the United
States. The reason is not American weakness. The United States has been the
world's strongest state throughout the 20th century and a sole superpower
since the end of the Cold War. ... Rather, the key reason is America's
unparalleled reputation for nonaggressive intentions."

The best way for the United States to retain its superiority, in other words,
is to repudiate the very strategy that the new imperialists have devised to
perpetuate it. An imperial strategy is inherently self-defeating. Wilson
understood that paradox in 1919, and it was borne out by America's experience
in the last half of the twentieth century. But it is a historical lesson being
ignored by the conservatives who now shape foreign policy in Washington. They
believe the United States has entered a new world in which the lessons of the
old no longer apply. That is almost certainly wrong. History is not physics.
But we ignore its lessons at our peril.